Short Film Uses Thousands of NASA Photos to Recreate the Moon Landing

There is a ton of evidence that suggests the moon landing wasn’t faked; that much is something that most reasonable people understand. One of the main concerns is that film and special effects technology just wasn’t good enough to make an observant viewer believe that a fictional moon landing video is real. We’re just thankful that the moon landing didn’t happen in modern times, because now that’s something that could be faked pretty convincingly. Take, for example, this new short film, LUNAR, which was animated from thousands of photos from NASA’s Apollo archives ( via Sploid).

“I was fascinated by the amount and the quality of the pictures,” motion designer Christian Stangl told  PetaPixel. “They were thousands of that beautiful high-res photographies made by the famous Hasselblad-Moon camera.
 When I looked at the archive, I knew immediately that I want to make a film with these photos!”

[brightcove video_id=”5446734615001″ brightcove_account_id=”3653334524001″ brightcove_player_id=“rJs2ZD8x”]

The seven-minute video is a collaboration between Stangl and his brother, composer Wolfgang Stangl, and it’s based on photos released in 2015 that were taken by astronauts during the Apollo missions. As you might imagine, making a video as stunning as this from still images was no easy task. It took 18 months to finish, and was created using two primary techniques: panoramic stitching, which involved combining photos to create more easily animated shots, and stop motion sequences, which involved taking photos shot in short sequence and creating transitions between them.

The video is truly an adventure in both space exploration and creative filmmaking and video editing, so check it out above and let us know in the comments if it blew you away as much as it did us.

Featured image: Christian Stangl/Vimeo

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